TIAMAT released "Wildhoney" on September 1st, 1994, through Century Media — the album that turned a Swedish death metal band into something the genre had no vocabulary for yet. Johan Edlund had dismissed the previous record outright, kept only bassist Johnny Hagel from the old lineup, and went into Woodhouse Studio with producer Waldemar Sorychta to build what came out as one continuous piece: birdsong, backwards tape, Mellotron and long ambient passages threaded between the growls and the riffs. It outsold Century Media's previous best-sellers and became one of the label's defining releases of the decade. AllMusic gave it four and a half stars, calling it the peak of the band's fusion of lingering death metal roots and ambient soundscape. Nearly every European gothic and atmospheric metal band of the following ten years owes it something.
